“We have to bring that desperation right from the beginning of the game.”

The Nuggets are back to three games under .500.

Blah.

And the reasons are nothing new. Denver doesn’t play enough tough defense. And they don’t go 48 minutes. You’ve heard it before. You heard it six paragraphs earlier when Shaw said it for the 32,438,938th time. And you’ll hear it again. Like right now:

The Nuggets’ $73,839,525 payroll this season is the 13th-highest in the the 30-team NBA. They’re above the cap, but won’t pay taxes because of various exemptions. It took a keen bit of math from general manager Tim Connelly to get there.

But next season, the Nuggets are already on the hook for $64,837,714. That’s the fifth-most in the NBA.

In other words, they’re handcuffed.

So if the calendar flips to 2015 and the Nuggets aren’t even sniffing the playoffs, they might just stop looking for a backup point, and start looking at trading away some big names (any of them).

Chew on this

• Britain’s Prince William and Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, watched courtside Monday as the Cavs beat the Nets in Brooklyn. And this happened:

That’s L.A.’s Juninho on a champagne slip and slide after the Galaxy won another MLS title, 2-1 in extra time over the upstart New England Revolution.

• A happy and hard-hitting 97th birthday to Kirk Douglas. He starred as backstabbing prizefighter Midge Kelly in a pretty good boxing movie from 1949 called “The Champion.”

Douglas shares a birthday with screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who grew up in Montrose, went to the University of Colorado and worked at the Boulder Daily Camera. He wrote a pretty good boxing movie from 1960 starring Douglas — called “Spartacus.”

Nick Groke: ngroke@denverpost.com or twitter.com/nickgroke

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